Tour of SuiteCRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Quick tour of SuiteCRM; Sales management, quotes, invoices, reports

SuiteCRM is a open source alternative to proprietary CRM systems like Salesforce and Dynamics. It is built on top of SugarCRM

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a critical aspect to any business. 

The impact of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) on the buyers experience

Can you remember a time when a company said they'd phone you and never did? Said they'd send you a quote but nothing for weeks. How did that feel as the customer? These are classic examples of poor CRM.

Compare that to a company that does exactly what they promised. You said phone me at 1pm in two weeks time. At exactly that time the phone rings. The fact you may have forgotten and can't talk doesn't detract from that kept promise. This experience is brought about from effective CRM.

The gains to your business regarding effective CRM are great and almost unmeasurable.

How does CRM impacts on your bottom line?

The first number that increases is your sell-through rate ie lead to customer. Increasing this conversion reduces the marketing spend to attract a new customer. Lets say for example that you spend a £100 on a advert of some kind. Lets say that brought in 10 new leads. If your conversion is 20% from lead to customer, each customer cost you £50. Now lets say you move the conversion to 30%, now each customer cost you £33.33. Pretty big difference right!

The second is the percentage of customers who decide to buy from you a second time. Returning customers can be huge to any business because in theory they have no marketing spend. Further more, at that point you've earned their confidence and trust making the transaction pretty easy compared to the first one. 

The third, when you've really impressed them, is that they won't be able to help but tell everyone how great you are. This can be where things get interesting because in a way they become unpaid sales people for your business. The people they refer are much more receptive to you because their friend said you were the best thing since sliced bread. For you to achieve this outcome takes work and going the extra mile for all your customers. You just never know who will become the latest addition to your sales team. 

The tour of the SuiteCRM system

SuiteCRM is a fully featured CRM system. In the video I'll show you how I use it to manage my customer relationships. In short this is what I go through:

  1. Creating a lead.
  2. Creating activities ie Call, Meeting and emails
  3. Convert it to a "opportunity" (for a sale). This action also creates a Company "Account" and a contact at the company
  4. Create and email a quote.
  5. Convert the quote to a invoice and email it.
  6. Quick look at the calendar of activities.
  7. Quick look at the reports

There is more to the system than what I cover. My aim was to demonstrate how most of my clients and myself uses SuiteCRM on a daily basis. 

Other notable areas of the system are:

  1. Marketing. The ability to do mass emails and manage marketing campaigns.
  2. Support. This allows for many customer services staff to support clients.
  3. Collaboration. This is for many staff to work together on business tasks.
  4. Accounts. This section is designed for use by a Accounts department for them to manage the invoices.

We're waiting to systemise your business

Please do get in touch if you're interested in systemising your business and making it shine above the competition. I can also provide training on customer services and using the SuiteCRM.

Would love to read any comments you may have...

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